Counterfeit Automotive Products

“It started with products that just looked like ours. Now there are products actually marketed and sold with our logo. They’ve even copied our instructions!”

—Jesse Powell, Aeromotive

If you pay any attention to the “outside world,” you may have occasionally seen mainstream media reports of counterfeit or knock-off fashions, watches, and purses; bootleg movie DVDs and music CDs; and nonauthentic brand-name software and computer programs. No big deal, right? But on a macro scale, it does add up. And the products aren’t just limited to Timex lookalikes, either. Intellectual property theft, counterfeit parts, and poor-quality knockoffs have spread to the point that in some instances public safety and even national security are endangered.

People have been sickened by phony brand-name prescription and over-the-counter drugs. They have been harmed by ersatz brand-name replacement auto parts that look exactly like the real thing—but aren’t. The rot has spread into the aerospace industry, endangering flight safety and even delaying NASA’s space programs.

Although no break-out figures are currently available for just the hot rod and racing industry, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says counterfeit auto parts cost the general global automotive parts industry $12 billion a year in lost sales; $3 billion of that total is in the U.S. The FTC also estimated that the U.S. auto parts industry lost sales to counterfeit parts correlates to potentially 200,000–250,000 fewer manufacturing jobs.

One thing we do know for sure is that there’s an increasing number of blatantly counterfeit, knock-off, and copycat hot rod and racing parts flooding into North America, nearly always of inferior quality. Although they seem like a bargain, these failure-prone phonies usually end up costing the consumer money in the long run—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of their long-term detrimental affects. In these pages, we’ll take a look at the scope of the problem, examine some textbook cases of counterfeiting, offer some tips on how to avoid becoming victimized in the first place, and show you how to fight back if you do get scammed.

Case Study: MSD 6AL

2/33Real Study the Logo: Is it in the proper location? Uses the traditional font? Is it crooked, blurry, or misspelled? Real companies won’t offer a product if their name isn’t 100 percent correct. Look at the Finish: Is it the right color? Is it painted instead of powdercoated? Is it made of the correct material?

3/33Fake Check the Components: Does it use the right fasteners, wires, and connections? Counterfeit, knock-off, and copycat parts have become a plague on the automotive performance industry. Can you tell which of these MSD 6AL ignition boxes is the fake? Turn the page to find out!

This article’s opening photos depict what appear to be two identical MSD 6AL ignition boxes. But the one on the right is a fake, one of the most elaborate counterfeit performance product rips so far. “We found it first in the repair department,” reports MSD President Russell Stephens. “It looked so authentic at first glance! But close inspection revealed it wasn’t ours. We ended up giving the customer a real product so they’d tell us where the phony came from. It turned out everything came off the Internet.”

Working with the FBI and its attorneys to ID the bad guys, MSD made buys of the phony products. Still an ongoing investigation, so far one Malaysian national was caught, tried, and convicted here in the U.S. But the chain ultimately leads back to Asia. Stephens admits that “so far we’ve never got to the original overseas source in a convictable manner.” Ultimately, MSD redesigned the packaging, then revised the entire product design and appearance, replacing the original MSD 6AL (PN 6420) with the current MSD Digital 6AL (PN 6425) box with a new cast-in logo. There still may be some legitimate original-type MSD 6AL inventory left in the retail pipeline, so these photos show some of the differences between the real product and the fake. If you are unfortunate enough to be stuck with the latter, MSD and the FBI want to know.

4/33The counterfeiters committed one glaring error. All known phonies to date have the same serial number: 682013. It’s as if you made perfect $100 bills, but put the same number on all of them!

“All the MSD counterfeits came off the Internet. We haven’t had any problems from authorized distributors. Don’t buy from an unknown fly-by-night operator.”

— Russell Stephens, MSD

Counterfeit, Knock-off, Copycat: What’s the Difference?

The cheapie product invasion ranges from generic lookalikes to full-on counterfeits, from technically legal items to out-and-out deceptive frauds. Counterfeits are just what you’d think: A true counterfeit mimics the look, the dimensions, the color, and the appearance of a genuine product, right down to the manufacturer’s logo and even packaging. As SEMA’s Senior Director of Federal Government Affairs Stuart Gosswein explains, “A counterfeit is an unauthorized exact copy with a logo.” Counterfeits are advertised as the real product, and sold as the real product. Although full-on, total counterfeits have been relatively rare in the U.S. performance world, they are increasing in both volume and sophistication. Among the most notable known counterfeits are the MSD 6AL ignition box and Auto Meter’s Monster and Pro Comp tachometers. Other publicly revealed counterfeits include MSD Blaster HVC coils and Aeromotive fuel pressure regulators, fuel pumps, and filters. There probably are even more rips floating around out there, but some manufacturers are unwilling to discuss the extent of the problem or provide details to the general public, feeling it would only provide miscreants a road-map for improving the quality of their fakes going forward. After all, some of the publicly disclosed counterfeits appear so real visually that average consumers can’t distinguish the fake from the real item.

At the other end of the spectrum—and fully legal—are generic standard replacement parts. For example, anyone can make a water pump, alternator, or starter for a small-block Chevy, they just can’t claim it’s “genuine GM.”

In between a blatant counterfeit and a generic part are what the industry calls “knock-offs” or “copycats,” a broad no man’s land, the gray area of our industry, and ultimately the province of lawyers and endless legal wrangling. Traditionally, knock-offs have caused the most grief in our industry, because there’s lots of legally amorphous areas, even in the U.S., let alone in the far overseas pavilions. Basically, a knock-off is a product that has features that resemble, or appear similar to, a popular, well-known product, yet is still technically distinguishable from the product it resembles. No specific claim is made that they are the same product or are made by the well-known manufacturer of the popular product. If the packaging and product logo don’t resemble the “real” product’s, the copycat is probably legally OK—but it still may cause consumer confusion. In some cases, even if the knock-off manufacturer legally distinguishes the copycat product from the well-known product, unscrupulous point-of-sale vendors at the retail level or on the Web may muddy the waters, leaving an impression that it’s an equivalent product.

So, hi-ho and off to court we go. Attorneys will do battle over whether the product is a rip-off or what’s known as a “legitimate variation.” A product may be deemed legitimate, Gosswein says, “if there is enough variation, despite the fact that someone else came up with the original idea. The issue hinges on whether there is a significant enough difference in design or other elements protected by a patent, trademark, or other intellectual property rights.”

Lack of vigilance in locking up their design and trademarks, or lack of funds to defend them, has come back to bite some manufacturers. For example, if a copycat wasn’t sufficiently distinguishable from the real product (which normally is actionable), but the original maker never applied for a patent or a trademark, or ever registered the design as is required some places overseas, it’s a lot harder (but not necessarily impossible) to protect the original design.

A typical example would be the wheel industry. “Wheel designs change fairly quickly,” explains Gosswein, “so some companies don’t register their design patents. They’re already moving on to something else.” Meanwhile, inferior foreign knock-offs that resemble the original design come in and flood the market.

In yet another twist, Gosswein explains there have even been cases where the company that originated the product contracted with a third party to manufacture it, and then the outside factory starts knocking off the product and selling it to other sources. “Companies need to nail down their offshore supply chain and ensure proper supervision and an ironclad contract. U.S. manufacturers have become much more sophisticated about the problem in recent years.”

Then there are some products which may have originated with one company, but have become —even if a company has dotted all its I’s and crossed its T’s—a generic term (at least in the public lexicon). In the real world, that’s pretty hard to stop. Think “escalator,” “zipper,” “posi” (as in limited-slip differential), or even “billet distributor.”

Why Should We Even Care?

The obvious reason is that the imitation product doesn’t perform nearly as well as the real McCoy. At a minimum, this can significantly decrease performance. Worse, the part may fail early and even catastrophically. That in turn could result in a significant financial loss when that first-order failure causes other parts to fail in succession. If major parts fail, public safety can be endangered: a brake pad disintegrates, a connecting rod goes though the oil pan, a seatbelt breaks under high-g loads. Get the picture?

When the cheap, inferior copy fails, usually there’s no warranty protection. Obviously, the maker of the real part is also a victim and under no obligation to back-up a counterfeit, knock-off, or copycat. And good luck getting any satisfaction from that amorphous online seller.

But there’s also more subtle damage “behind the screen”: Problems with counterfeits and knock-offs ultimately erode confidence in the real product. For example, suppose sneaky Wile E. Coyote Industries cloned a legitimate, well-respected Acme Industries’ part. To the consumer, the real and phony parts looked the same, but the cheap copy wasn’t reliable and—even when it worked—didn’t perform as it should. This hurt the sales of Acme, the company making the genuine product, undermining its reputation and good name, and adversely impacting its financial viability.

In severe cases, phony (yet indistinguishable) parts have started to contaminate the legitimate warehouse, jobber, and retail parts chain. This has been well documented in the aerospace and standard replacement auto parts industries. While this isn’t yet a major problem in the performance industry, the result would breed general distrust of even legitimate parts vendors and retailers.

There’s also the “crap rises to the surface” effect: Cheap, inferior, foreign copycat parts, even when technically legal under the law, will ultimately crowd-out legitimate U.S.-made products. That costs jobs. When everyone’s thrown out of work, who’s left to buy the products? You have now entered a downward spiral toward oblivion.

Cheap foreign parts aren’t just cheap because of labor cost differences and inferior materials. Because they are copies of a product someone else has already designed, the rip-off parts don’t have to amortize into their price structure the research-and-development (R&D) costs borne by the original, legitimate manufacturer when it designed, tested, and figured out how to make the product in the first place.

Some of the high-end performance products took years of real-world testing to perfect. Aeromotive President Steve Matusek explains, “We write our own specs, design our own products. We are problem-solvers, hands-on guys. Everyone here races. Our R&D is done by us on the racetrack. We test on our own cars. It may take three-to-four years to perfect a new product until we’re satisfied. Then someone comes along and just copies it and sells it for one-third the price.”

After a new product has been introduced, Auto Meter’s attorney Merritt Blakeslee says there are costly ongoing marketing and product support costs. Legitimate performance-industry manufacturers “have multimillion-dollar budgets for building and maintaining their market identity and providing superior after-sale support to their customers; and the rip-offs are parasites that reap the benefit of those expenditures while sucking the blood of the host organism.”

At some point all this could discourage innovation and creativity: Manufacturers may become reluctant to invest money in pushing the envelope if there’s no real payoff at the end of the road. That’s why our Founding Fathers authorized granting exclusive patents to new, innovative designs and products. Have no doubt, stealing someone’s idea—aka their “intellectual property”—is legally and morally the same as stealing a physical item. Controlling the product of one’s own mind is a fundamental human right in a free society.

Case Study: Auto Meter Tachs

There are cheap, low-priced, poorly constructed and performing Chinese counterfeits of popular Auto Meter gauges and tachometers floating around. Popular rips include the Sport-Comp II tach (PN 3699), the Carbon Fiber tach (PN 4899), and the Sport-Comp Silver tach (PN 3911). Auto Meter attorney Merritt Blakeslee warns that “different Internet sellers use different marketing techniques. Some use an image of the counterfeit, which often contains details revealing the product to be a fake. Other sellers market their fakes by using an image of a genuine Auto Meter product. The only foolproof way for to determine whether the product is counterfeit is price and the reputation of the person whom they are buying from.

“The counterfeit tachs sell for 40–80 percent of the retail price of a genuine product. If the product is being sold as new, in-the-box; if the seller has more than a few for sale; and if the product is priced significantly lower than the price quoted by large Internet sellers like Summit Racing and Jegs, it’s virtually certain it’s counterfeit. Some sellers of counterfeits tell their customers they can offer these low prices because they ‘buy in volume.’ This is pure baloney. Auto Meter has consistent pricing throughout the industry.

15/33Look closer: The counterfeit (left) lacks the real tach’s graphic on the side of the shift-light. The real tach’s shock strap has a glossy silver enamel finish to match its anodized silver bezel; the phony’s strap is black and made from lighter-gauge metal. Auto Meter’s real tach has a durable powdercoated finish; the phony’s cheap spray-painted finish chips and scratches easily.

“These counterfeits are low-cost, poor-quality products that typically malfunction in short order. Indeed, Auto Meter first became aware of them when its customer service department began receiving an unusual number of requests for warranty service from customers who reported either no function, slow or inaccurate response, or other hardware issues you simply don’t experience with real Auto Meter products.”

How is the Industry Fighting Back?

Teaming up with SEMA and various government agencies including the FBI and Customs, companies like ARP, MSD, Aeromotive, Flowmaster, and Auto Meter have aggressively gone after the rip-off artists, fighting to preserve the integrity of their brand and product. But legal action can take years. “In the meantime, the problem is harming our industry,” laments Auto Meter President Jeff King. “If people buy a product that they think is ours, and it fails, our reputation suffers. They think we made junk.”

Even if legal action ultimately succeeds here in the U.S., it’s hard to reach, prosecute, and put out of business companies and individuals operating out of Asia or the old Eastern Bloc. “Just about everything we’ve seen comes out of China or Hong Kong,” maintains Auto Meter’s Blakeslee. Foreign governments often turn a blind eye to these shadowy factories, seeing it as a source of revenue to grow their local economies. Shutting down the foreign sellers and U.S. resellers of these products is doable by working with the intellectual property protection programs maintained by Internet sites like eBay, Amazon, and Alibaba, but it’s time-consuming and requires continuous monitoring. Like a game of Whac-a-Mol, if one site is shut down, the perps often set up a new outlet using a different name.

Alternatives to lengthy and often frustrating legal action include redesigning the product packaging with a new look that’s also harder to duplicate. Attempting to stay one step ahead of the counterfeiters, some companies also change the outward appearance of the product itself.

Going further yet, Aeromotive, Comp Cams, and others say the best solution is just to keep innovating, coming up with new ideas and better products to offer the consumer a value-added item that’s clearly superior to any cheap foreign rip-off. By the time an existing product’s been ripped, the original product’s makers will have gone on to something even better. As Comp Cams’ Brian Reese puts it, “Knock-offs are a form of competition, evil as it is, but in the end it makes us come out with even better parts.”

On the other hand, staying one step ahead of the competition or changing product design isn’t always practical for companies marketing mature technology with long-established trademarks and brand identity, who, Blakeslee maintains, “have achieved their market share through years of building a reputation for quality and for creating and maintaining the trademarks that identify them in the marketplace. Changing the brand-name or trademark is the equivalent of committing commercial suicide, of walking away from the market identity and good will that, in the case of Auto Meter, has been more than half a century in the making. What Auto Meter is selling is, for the most part, not new technology but products that are more reliable, more accurate, and more durable than others in the market. Auto Meter achieves these characteristics not by cutting corners in their manufacturing but by providing superior product support.”

Whether its lawyers and legal action, product redesign, or stepping up the pace of innovation, it all costs money. Someone has to pick up the tab. “Patenting a product costs about $10,000–$15,000 initially,” Reese explains. “But it takes about $200,000 to enforce a patent. It’s impractical to patent everything when you have, like Comp does, over 40,000 different parts.” And patents eventually expire.

Case Study: Comp Cams Hi-Tech Rockers

19/33Real or copy? Rockers from left: Comp Cams’ new Ultra Pro-Magnum, an older genuine Hi-Tech Stainless, and two different copies of the Hi-Tech Stainless

As far as Comp Cams can tell, no retail seller has actually made a full-on counterfeit of its Hi-Tech Stainless Steel roller rocker arm, but there are some copies and knock-offs that look identical, except for Comp’s specific logo on the part. Manufactured offshore and sold domestically by a number of sources, these products are technically legal because they don’t claim to be the real Comp Cams product or feature the Comp Cams logo. However, the cheap copies use inferior materials and poor manufacturing techniques, so they often fail under severe use. Because they resemble Comp’s well-known design, this negatively impacts confidence in the original part. Comp’s solution, says Brian Reese, is to “improve and develop products faster than people can make copies. The day we finish, we will start working on the next version, only even better.” Comp has recently replaced its often-copied Hi-Tech Stainless Steel roller rockers with the even better Ultra Pro-Magnum XD rocker. These photos show just a few of the many defects Comp found when it analyzed off-the-shelf knock-off rockers.

Case Study: ARP Bolts

25/33Real Real ARP-made fasteners are specifically marked “ARP” and usually with the alloy as well. Knock-offs so far have been “blank” or stamped with a generic alloy such as “8740” or “2000.”

26/33Fake Real ARP-made fasteners are specifically marked “ARP” and usually with the alloy as well. Knock-offs so far have been “blank” or stamped with a generic alloy such as “8740” or “2000.”

Automotive Racing Products (ARP) has been hit by misleading copycats, but not outright counterfeiting. Still, it fought back and won. “We’ve never seen ‘ARP’ stamped on a copycat fastener,” explains ARP’s Chris Raschke. “But we have trademarked ‘ARP 2000’ and the mark ‘2000’ as applied to a fastener. The knock-off products were stamping their bolts just ‘2000.’ The online seller of the Chinese-made product claimed the foreign foundry made the same bolt for us; that we just ‘paid extra’ for getting it stamped ‘ARP.’

“In truth, anything stamped ‘ARP’ is made by us in the U.S. Most products will also show the alloy, as in ‘ARP 8740’ or ‘ARP 2000.’ The quality of the copycat was nowhere near our quality. Although sometimes offshore bolts nearly match the tensile strength and Rockwell hardness of our product, they have nowhere near the fatigue strength. They don’t have Mil-Spec style ‘J-threads’ rolled after heat treating like we do. They have trouble properly forming the under-head radius. Both of these processes are critical for fatigue resistance.

27/33A real ARP rod-bolt (left) and its other critical, non-blind fasteners have a distinct precision dimple on the bottom of the shank, so those who desire it can readily center a stretch gauge to check for proper elongation during installation.

“Ultimately, we sued the company marketing the generic ‘2000’ bolts and made them stop. They’re a customer of ours now!” Some of ARP’s competitors have also copied the look and size of its packaging. ARP’s stopped that, too—at least for the moment.

How Can We Avoid Being Scammed?

It really all boils down to that old human emotion, probably embedded into our DNA: Selfishness and greed. Greed among rip-off artists, for sure; but also, greed among consumers. We have met the enemy, and he is us. Be honest with yourself: Is that rock-bottom price from some niche vendor on eBay.com or Alibaba.com really legit? “If the pricing is 20–80-percent cheaper than the going rate for a particular product, it’s most likely counterfeit,” claims Auto Meter President Jeff King.

Why is an item coming all the way from China or Hong Kong? “If the product is claimed to be the product of an American manufacturer, and it’s shipping from China, it’s almost certainly 100 percent counterfeit,” maintains King.

Use some common sense. Buy from authorized brick-and-mortar retailers or legitimate, known online retailers. Be very careful at swap-meets and flea markets; be suspicious of “open-box” sellers. If you do buy from niche sites, at least check the product reviews and customer satisfaction indices.

Comparing photos from the niche site with actual product photos from the real manufacturer’s website may be helpful. “We have safeguards and regs on the color-match for all our products,” explains Aeromotive’s Matusek. “If a product appears in a different shade or color on a website, chances are good it’s a knock-off or counterfeit.”

What is the niche site’s return policy? Do they list a physical address? Do they have a real customer-service phone number? If in doubt, check with the legitimate product manufacturer’s sales or tech support department before making a big-ticket purchase.

Case Study: Flowmaster Mufflers

Flowmaster has seen both knockoffs and crude counterfeits. The most duplicated, according to President Nate Shelton, is “our 40-series mufflers when the patent ran out. Some actually say ‘Flowmaster;’ some have a slightly distorted name like ‘Flow Monster.’ They’ve copied our internal chambers and tuning characteristics. Usually the products are white-boxed with the same basic part number as ours. A lot of this stuff showed up in ‘legitimate’ muffler shops. We went after them—and got it stopped.”

What Should We Do if We Were Scammed?

Let’s face it: Despite our best intentions, any of us can get bit. If you think you may have been taken in by a phony product, contact the real manufacturer for that type of product. As a K&N Filters spokesperson puts it, “In many instances K&N has been contacted directly by distributors and by consumers reporting such counterfeit items for sale. This reporting aids us in identifying the major players marketing the counterfeit products at the retail level. We then try to establish who is involved at the wholesale level, with the ultimate goal being to identify the actual counterfeiting operation, and the country where the counterfeiter is producing the counterfeits.”

Most companies will first want to see a photo of the possible fake, and ultimately, have you send in the actual product for analysis. Although under no legal obligation to offer redress for a product that is not theirs, some may have an informal policy of keeping their potential customer base happy.

Industry trade groups like SEMA have also teamed up with federal government agencies to investigate spurious product allegations. Many states’ attorneys general also have a complaint procedure. Reputable consumer marketplace sites will accept complaints and may permanently ban repeat offenders.

All this may sound like a pain when you’d rather be just slamming the pedal to the metal, but we have to start somewhere: Bringing counterfeit and knock-off parts to heel requires all of us—government agencies, industry trade groups, the companies themselves, jobbers, shops, retailers, and the end-user—to step up and take responsibility for their actions and band together to fight this scourge. As Auto Meter’s Jeff King bluntly puts it: “People need to have personal responsibility for the actions they take. Knowingly buying a counterfeit product hurts American products and jobs.” Not to mention yourself.

Case Study: Aeromotive Regulator

Aeromotive’s popular fuel pressure regulator (PN 13109) is said to be the most common knock-off in its product line. Some even have a laser-etched Aeromotive logo. Placed side by side, the two products are hard to tell apart externally. The genuine item has stainless steel screws and vacuum port barb fittings, with a brass gauge-port fitting (test with a magnet). The poorly machined O-ring bosses on the phony are leak-prone. Other clues are a poor finish, including machine-marks, imperfections, and other inconsistencies.

National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) is the U.S. government’s multiagency task-force clearinghouse chaired by the Department of Homeland Security for investigations into counterfeiting and piracy—crimes that threaten the public’s health and safety, the U.S. economy, and our war fighters: ICE.gov/iprcenter/iprreferral.htm

Global Intellectual Property Center, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is a large group of companies and trade associations (including SEMA) that have banded together to fight counterfeiting: TheGlobalIpCenter.com/get-involved/cacp/

The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, accepts online Internet crime complaints from either the actual victim or from a third party for the complainant: IC3.gov/default.aspx